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Nuit de Chine at the Costume Institute: A Sleuth Finds the Formula for a Lost Perfume

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Nuit de Chine at the Costume Institute: A Sleuth Finds the Formula for a Lost Perfume

By Joshua Barone May 8, 2015 6:16 pmMay 8, 2015 6:16 pm

Photo

Nuit de Chine, created in 1913 by Maurice Schaller for the fashion designer Paul Poiret, was sold in a flacon inspired by Chinese snuff bottles.Credit Joshua Barone/The New York Times

Nuit de Chine has made a long journey, from a Paris fashion house in 1913 to an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art today.

The perfume, created by Maurice Schaller for the designer Paul Poiret, was almost lost to history but has been recreated according to its original formula for the Costume Institute’s latest exhibition, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” about Western fashion’s fascination with chinoiserie. (Holland Cotter has reviewed the show, which opened May 7.)

Andrew Bolton, the exhibition’s curator, said he wanted to incorporate fragrances into the show, which otherwise is largely a collection of dresses on mannequins arranged like stills in lavish films. He almost immediately thought of Poiret, who with Nuit de Chine began a trend of early-20th-century perfumes inspired by China.

Nuit de Chine was “the first fragrance to really capture the spirit of chinoiserie,” said Paul Austin, the founder and chief executive of Austin Advisory Group, which specializes in discovering and telling origin stories for brands. Poiret had collaborated with the illustrator Georges Lepape to design a flacon inspired by Chinese snuff bottles, and the scent is a blend of vanilla, bergamot and opoponax (which adds balsamic notes).

In the early days of putting together “China: Through the Looking Glass,” Mr. Bolton said, he was not sure how the fragrance would be a part of the exhibition, but he did know he would need Mr. Austin’s help to recreate Nuit de Chine.

There were two challenges. The first was that while flacons of Nuit de Chine survived, the scent would not have stayed the same over decades. Recreating it based on a sample “would have been a real trial and error,” Mr. Austin said.

He would need the formula itself, which led to the second problem: Nuit de Chine’s history. As Mr. Austin tells the story, Poiret’s fashion house failed financially in 1929 and was bought by another company. In the 1930s, the new owner approached a young perfume maker named Yuri Gutsatz and asked him to modernize the 40 fragrances Poiret had created. But World War II began, and he never carried out the task.

Enter the Osmothèque in Versailles, France. It is the world’s largest fragrance archive, so Mr. Austin went there for help. Months of waiting followed, but the results of the Osmothèque’s research paid off, he said: Gutsatz had never let go of Nuit de Chine’s formula. Of Poiret’s 40 fragrances, recipes for 11 survive, and the Osmothèque had all of them. Mr. Austin persuaded the archive to reissue the perfume exactly as it was in 1913.

With Nuit de Chine resurrected, it was time to find a place for it in the Met’s exhibition. That, Mr. Bolton said, was a struggle. “We were finding it really hard to localize it without really permeating the galleries,” he said. “We thought it was a bit of a dead end.”

Mr. Austin came up with the idea of a scent strip, which has since been included with each copy of the exhibition’s catalog purchased at the Met. It is a quiet end to Nuit de Chine’s journey back to life, but Mr. Austin said he was satisfied. After all, he said, his work is in finding out origins, and “this was the ultimate source story.”